We have mail in voting. We don’t have universal mail in voting. You have to request a mail in ballot. That’s as big an apathy hurdle as going to vote. More, it requires prior independent thought.
Is requesting a mail-in ballot any bigger of a hurdle than registering to vote?
It might not be bigger but it another hurdle. With actually filling in the ballot (correctly) a third hurdle and returning the ballot timely a fourth.
IANA @Loach or a parent, but as a new retiree freshly unmoored from my old routines I can see becoming sufficiently disinterested in anything but my narrow daily activities that at least one of those 4 might prove too hard in the doing. Despite my lifelong habit of being interested in civic and world events.
A habit that much of youth of any place and era would not yet have embraced. Couple in the current youthful quasi-ADHD of pathologically short attention spans and continuous distractions, and any of those tasks might simply pass unnoticed until a week later.
Certainly not for everyone everywhere, but perhaps for enough people in the right places for it to matter.
On the other hand, if Swift’s encouragement also increases youth voting to the same proportion as she’s increased youth registration, it’ll make a huge difference. And still leave lots and lots of disengaged youths, too, of course, but we can’t expect her to motivate everyone. And margins in many elections are small enough that she probably will be directly responsible for flipping at least some races.
And hooray if that happens. Some will for sure. And the forces of decency need all the help they can get. From whichever source, no matter how unorthodox. Go Swifties!
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. It’s absolutely a good thing. How much of a good thing is debatable. Getting your followers to click on a link is easy. Getting them to care enough to follow through is another thing.
Have you seen the line for the ladies’ room at a Taylor Swift concert? I have. Even the most understaffed and overpopulated polling station in the Deep South would be a cakewalk in comparison.
Well everyone’s gotta go sometime.
the product to be deposited is slightly different, tho …
Which had the lyric, “I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it”. I rousing affirmation of lesbian identity, it ain’t.
There’s also a B in LGBTQ+.
The bigger criticism, I think, would be that male-dominated society has always been tolerant or even encouraging of female bisexuality, or rather, sexual acts between women who nonetheless prefer men overall and to which their men are privy. There’s a big gulf between “women making out with each other is sexy” and “actual lesbians with no interest in men are accepted by society”.
The male fantasy is two women doing sexual things with each other, but as soon as the male arrives on the scene, both of them break off and start doing sexual things with the male. It’s not the male arriving on the scene and the two women telling him “well, I already have a partner, so I’m not looking for a relationship right now” (what you’d get from actual bisexuality), and it’s certainly not “What would I ever need a man for? Men aren’t my type” (actual lesbianism).
I suppose that mainstream acceptance of “women making out with each other is sexy” is at least a small step up from “everything with any trace of homosexuality to it should be suppressed, shunned, and destroyed”, but we should be well past that small step by now.
Another verse of the song is
No, I don’t even know your name
It doesn’t matter.
You’re my experimental game
Just human nature.
That’s not a song about a woman discovering her true sexuality; that’s a woman fetishizing lesbianism as something “kinky” and “taboo” and “naughty”.
I think a big hurdle to mail-in voting, at least the way Ohio does it, is that it requires stamps. It takes 1 stamp to request your ballot and 2 stamps to return it. Stamps are just not a thing for young people. You may or may not know where your parents keep the stamps at home (if they even do keep stamps), but you definitely didn’t buy stamps to take to college with you.
There are indeed a lot of ways to vote in Ohio - in person at the BOE for a month before election day (only one per county, so it can be a hike for many), in person on voting day (it’s possible many people think that all polling places have long lines which is definitely not the case), or by mail (with 3 stamps). But all of them have laziness/disinterest barriers.
The best anyone can do, on a national scale, is to get young people fired up enough to really want to overcome those barriers and go out to vote. Swift is just the woman for the job!
In Washington State, there is no need to request a ballot. Everyone gets one in the mail. And, as I recall, you can drop it in a drop off box or mail it postage prepaid. No stamps involved. So, registering to vote is the big hurdle. (not that big). Once it’s accomplished, the ballots just arrive.
That’s friggin awesome! I wish we had that here!
Ohio also has all-hours ballot drop-boxes at the Board of Elections, in at least some counties (including Cuyahoga). It’s downtown, right next to Cleveland State University. So if you’re going to be downtown anyway for some reason, you can save the stamp on returning your ballot (while still avoiding whatever lines there might be for actually voting in person).
And there are also a lot of places where there aren’t long lines even for voting in person on Election Day. I like voting in person just because I enjoy the tradition of it, and where I am now, I don’t think I’ve ever had to wait for more than ten minutes or so.
Oh totally, same for me. But if all you ever consume is Internet News, via clickbaity headlines, with no point of reference of the actual in-person voting experience, then chances are that all you know of polls is that the lines are long. Have you ever seen a news story about how un-remarkable it is to vote? No, because that’s not news. So for many young people, the idea of in-person voting is also a turn-off.
Some folks just need to be fired up to vote. My neighbor who is extremely politically active and has always stressed the importance of voting to his kids, told me his daughter in college barely got her absentee ballot returned. He was furious. She is just a young person. For some reason, that is how they roll.
To get back to Tay Tay - if she can mobilize young people to actually CAST BALLOTS now that she has everyone under her spell, she’s gonna be the person of the decade. I don’t know how much work she has done in that specific area, or if she has plans. But something needs to be done to let these kids know how important this all is, and she’s definitely a person who can do it.
I prefer it because I want that little “I voted” sticker - it’s my “complaining about the government” license for the year.
IIRC, our mail-in ballots come with a little “I Voted” sticker. 